Alistair Campbell

Because I think, again...

If you are like me, a regular listener to the Today program, you're a bit surprised to discover what's actually happening in the Straits.

My guess is most listeners don't really know because what you tend to hear every morning is President Trump is on the verge of reopening the Straits.

He's got this wonderful peace deal and it's just about to happen.

And the first ceasefire was announced in April.

And you've been quite good at pointing out that it doesn't seem very likely that this is going to happen.

But the markets have kept betting that it's just about to reopen.

You keep seeing these very weird things where, you know, May the 24th, for example, Brent oil prices dropped very dramatically on the announcement.

We're now talking on the 9th of June that the Straits were about to reopen.

The truth of the matter is there are about 1,500 ships still stranded in the Strait.

Basically, none are getting through.

I mean, occasionally, there'll be stories of three or four ships getting through here and there.

But there were, in the old days, about 130 ships a day going through.

There are now 1,500 ships stranded.

Probably 20,000, you've talked about this too, 20,000 crew members in pretty horrible situations.

Mm-hmm.

And either the US intercept Iranian ships or the Iranians intercept ships with gunboats that don't have their permission, which are very little getting through.

Now, that means that if you get a beyond Europe, and as you say, Europe is in real trouble, we could be a few weeks off a massive crisis on jet fuel, diesel that we're not even beginning to talk about.

But if you're Japan, you're already in that crisis because NAFTA, which is a petroleum product that you use for so many things, right?

It's what you use for inks, dyes, specialist plastics, rubbers, right at the heart of the whole manufacturing process.